You've seen our picks for the year's ten best sci-fi films. Now prepare yourselves for the worst. 2009 turned out to be a good year for science fiction overall, but it still had its share of crap.
Now we present to you that crap:
10. Terminator Salvation
Forget the on-set rants of Christian Bale; Terminator Salvation, the fourth film of the franchise, produced enough negativity on its own. In this screwy timeline, John Connor is on a mission to rescue his adolescent father so that he can retroactively preserve his own existence ... or something like that. At the same time, the machines have developed a means to construct replicate human beings, and they have built one that gets caught up with the Resistance, not even realizing he’s a robot. This all could have meant something to the Terminator universe if the writers had done something with it, but ultimately the film takes a long route to nowhere while punishing viewers with loud but empty dialogue along the way. At least the action's good.
9. G-Force
You know how you’ve always wanted to watch cutesy guinea pigs fight crime with high-tech gadgets? No, neither have we. Apparently Jerry Bruckheimer’s market researchers think someone does, though, because this year they gave us G-Force. Even children are likely to be bored by its cookie-cutter plot and predictable outcome. If you think watching guinea pigs catching up with friends on Facebook and spouting pop catchphrases sounds funny, this movie is for you.
8. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
It’s almost unfair to include Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus on this list because it is at least partially bad on purpose. The fact that it’s often difficult to tell which parts are ironically bad and which are just bad, though, really hurts its style of humor, and the distinctly small amount of screen time given to the title monsters pushes it right into dud territory. It’s clear that the filmmakers had a limited budget to work with, here, but that fact doesn’t help matters when you barely show viewers the only two good things about your movie. We will give it this, though: it’s got the coolest scene of a gargantuan shark leaping thousands of feet into the air to catch a commercial jet in flight EVER.
7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
If you were to ask X-Men fans last year which mutant deserves his own spin-off film, the majority undoubtedly would have voted for Wolverine. For any such fans, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is one big “Be careful what you ask for.” Coming off the disappointing third act of the X-Men trilogy, Wolverine kept the streak of mediocrity alive. It packed every action cliché imaginable (e.g. the slow-motion walk from a fire you just started) into a plot that would bore even the most hardened Wolverine fanatic. Plus, what’s the point of an origins tale if the character never remembers any of it?
6. Battle for Terra
In a lot of ways, Battle for Terra is actually similar to Avatar. Unfortunately, that’s only true for the parts that don’t make Avatar the amazing film it is. This is a movie about human aggressors attempting to take over a poor little alien planet, and within this setup the script takes every predictable turn it can. All the while, viewers are treated to animation as stiff as the plot. When our Editor in Chief went to see this, he had to go to a second theater after the first tried multiple times unsuccessfully to play the film. He should have taken that as a sign.
5. Gamer
If you think the world stinks now, just wait until “Some years from this exact moment,” when video games allow you to take control of real people, and everyone on Earth is sexually depraved and morally corrupt. Gamer’s plot and subplots are nonsensical, and the rules of the game within it are indeterminable. But really, what can you expect from a movie that features a guy barfing vodka into an automobile’s engine to get it to run?
4. The Time Traveler's Wife
This one almost doesn’t count because it clearly wasn’t intended for the sci-fi crowd. Alas, though, it is science fiction, and it is bad. Anyone unfortunate enough to catch The Time Traveler’s Wife had to sit through fifty minutes of sentimental slop with the sole objective of trying to pull tears. The only good thing we can say about this movie is that it accomplishes what it sets out to do: make its viewers genuinely sad.
3. Planet 51
With its premise of a human astronaut inadvertently setting foot on a populated alien planet and subsequently becoming the victim of a misguided manhunt, Planet 51 sets itself up to be original and potentially subversive. Somewhere along the line, though, the writers seem to have just given up. What resulted is possibly the most unoriginal sci-fi film of the year. Its aliens’ culture is practically identical to 1950s America, and its moral is one of literature’s most tired: you shouldn’t dislike people just because they’re different from you. We dare you to think of a good reason to watch this movie.
2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
You knew it’d be somewhere on the lower end of this list. There was no need to tamper with the winning formula of the 2007 Transformers film, but for some reason director Michael Bay did anyway. He chose to populate Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with a dizzying number of robots (including two irritating and inadvertently racist twins), nonsensical action sequences (how did Sam’s parents get to Egypt, anyhow?), and grade school humor (look, that robot is humping Megan Fox’s leg). We could go on, but you probably saw the movie. For that, we express our condolences.
1. 2012
If 2012 is indeed the end of days for our civilization, let’s hope what’s left of the human race has a better tale to tell than the one depicted in Roland Emmerich’s 2012, the worst science fiction film of 2009. Emmerich is a director primarily known for his proclivity for destroying things on a massive scale, so in that regard this is his quintessential work. And that is the problem. In 2012, Emmerich is so caught up in destroying our world that he doesn’t put anything (or anybody) interesting in it. Our hero is a failed writer/limo driver that somehow repeatedly (and we mean repeatedly) avoids the very danger that has claimed the lives of nearly everyone on Earth. Coincidence turns up at every corner of the script, and Emmerich is forced to begin reusing his tricks after about forty-five minutes -- with two more hours to go! Those who watch this movie might find themselves wishing for the world to end.
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